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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/25047529">All The Things her Brother Taught Her</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/StopTalkingAtMe/pseuds/StopTalkingAtMe'>StopTalkingAtMe</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>The King in Yellow - Robert W. Chambers</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>F/M</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>Español</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-07-03</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-07-03</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-04 10:26:41</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Mature</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>5,383</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/25047529</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/StopTalkingAtMe/pseuds/StopTalkingAtMe</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>"You are at war. And the King in Yellow will win."</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>7</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>9</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Collections:</b></td><td>Multifandom Horror Exchange (2020)</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>All The Things her Brother Taught Her</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><ul class="associations">
      <li>For <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/users/RobberBaroness/gifts">RobberBaroness</a>.</li>



    </ul></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>i</p><p>A long time ago, back when she was a kid, her brother bought her a birthday present, a set of elaborately painted Russian dolls. This was before David had been stolen away to the service of the King and the world was a different place back then. It was a time she remembered, when she could bear to think about it at all, as a kind of fever dream, because to do otherwise was to grieve all over again for everything they’d lost.</p><p>She held the largest doll in her hands for a long while, not quite sure what to do with this thing with its serene, smiling face peering out from beneath a richly embroidered shawl of painted wood. “It’s really pretty,” she said, and David tousled her hair until she pulled away and jabbed him with her elbow. “Get off, weirdo,” she said, but she was laughing.</p><p>“Open it up,” he urged, smiling, and okay, so what if there was a glimmer in his eyes she wasn’t sure she liked? He was smiling, and she hadn’t seen that in too damn long, so she obeyed, twisting the first and largest doll into two halves like some dumb magic trick. Nestling inside her was another doll, another sweetly smiling face, and: “Keep going,” said David, and so she did, opening doll after doll, and always putting the two halves back together before opening the next, because it creeped her out to see their halves rolling about all over the place, even if inside they were nothing but unpainted wood.</p><p>The sinuous line of Russian dolls grew around her, each one smaller than the one before, and her unease intensified, because David’s smile seemed to be getting more fixed, a muscle in his jaw clenching tight as he leaned forward, so close she could hear his teeth grinding together. Her fingers grew clumsy, slippery with sweat, and the painted dolls shrank, growing ever more delicate.</p><p>“How many more are there?” she asked when she reached a doll that was about half the size of her little finger, and inside that–</p><p>She didn’t want to know.</p><p>“Open it,” said David.</p><p>Maybe it would have been easier if he hadn’t still been smiling, but he was – a grin that stretched almost from ear to ear, and his lips wrinkled back in a way that put her in mind of a snarling animal. What his mother would come to call his rabid dog look, until they’d started to pretend David never existed at all.</p><p>Pinching each end of the doll, she split it open. Inside the next doll was different. Faceless, featureless, a little yellow doll the side of her thumbnail. So tiny it might have skittered out of her grip and been easily lost, and if that happened, she thought, at least she’d never have to see what was inside, because even this doll was seamed along its middle. But somehow she liked the thought of this little yellow thing lost in her house even less than the thought of seeing what was inside. The other dolls crowded too close around her, so that she could hardly move in case she sent them tumbling like skittles. Hands shaking, she opened it up, stared uncomprehending at what lay inside. Not a doll nestled inside this one, but a folded scrap of paper.</p><p>“Open it,” he’d said.</p><p> </p><p>ii</p><p>Even the heat of the sun felt different out beyond the fence. Relentless, baking the land to a hard dry crust, and making the asphalt sticky underfoot. It rendered everything in shades of sepia, like all the colour had been bleached from the world. Except for the sky: barely late afternoon and still the clouds were coloured in all the shades of sunset, with the sun a dying ember, leaving a scorched smear across the horizon.</p><p>The world she used to know, impossibly vast yet tiny at the same time, shrank to a series of impressions: faded, flaking paint; yellowing grass; sweat pooling in the small of her back and beading on her forehead. There was no respite from the heat except the kiss of cool air through the cracked window of the passenger seat, and even that only lasted while the car was moving. Once they’d reached their destination and she was standing by the car with the slam of its door still seeming to echo all around her loud as a gunshot, there was no respite then.</p><p>The landscape here was desolate and bleak, overgrown fields left to go to seed stretching away in all directions. No sound but the droning of bees, the breeze rustling the grass. Nothing to break the monotony or interrupt her sight-lines except the long abandoned burnt-out house,</p><p>One thing Sebastian was right about: if anything came for her, she’d see it coming. Assuming, of course, that it wasn’t here already.</p><p>It was so quiet she was struck by the feeling that if she turned around, she might find the road had vanished, and the car with it, like reality was stretched thin out here beyond the fence, and her link back to the real world was fine as spider-silk, tenuously close to snapping.</p><p>“Is it safe?” she’d asked him when he first told her he had somewhere to show her. At least he’d considered the question before he answered, even if his answer, which was that nowhere was really safe these days, hadn’t been all that reassuring. There was a gleam in his eye that she didn’t much like, if only because it made her think of her brother. It was the same fever-bright light that used to glitter in David’s eyes when his mind was wandering, the days when he gnawed the skin around his nails red-raw.</p><p>To think of David was, as always, to summon him, She’d barely thought of him in years, had trained herself with bitter care and concentration until she’d mostly forgotten that she ever had a brother, but he was back now.</p><p>Burrs prickled her legs through her jeans as she made her way through the long grass towards the ruined cottage, forcing away the images of bodies crouching in the grass, hidden from view. Trying not to imagine David rising out of the grass once she’d reached the mid-way point, far closer than she’d expected – <em>too close</em> – grinning the way he’d started to do towards the end, with his lips drawn back and the whites of his eyes showing. Blackened teeth in anaemic gums, overgrown fingernails black with filth. Hands stretched out towards her, palms open in a <em>See? Not dangerous</em> gesture, which anyone could have seen from his eyes was a lie. The same dark coat he’d had for decades, and which had once been too small for him, now in his half-starved state making him look like a child wearing an adult’s clothes.</p><p>She’d thought she glimpsed him once on the outskirts of town, running with his head down, the filthy coat flapping behind him and the soles of his feet black, cut to ribbons from broken glass. At the memory – which was probably invented anyway; David was long gone – she clenched her hands into fists so tight the nails bit into the meat of her palms.</p><p>Not Sebastian’s fault – he wasn’t to blame for her fucked-up childhood or the state of the world these days, no more than she could be held to blame for her resentment at the way he’d stirred up all her old, bad memories, got her seeing patterns in the shadows again. Got her listening once more to the murmur of the bees, the rustle of the wind in the grass, and underneath the beat of her heart, and how they all together combined into a song for the glory of the King.</p><p>Behind her, the car door slammed. Loud as a gunshot, ringing out. She flinched and looked back, unable to stop her fear from showing on her face.</p><p>Sebastian was out of the car, leaning against the hood, arms crossed. Smiling, but with evident impatience in the way he was holding himself still. He jutted his chin towards the house, urging her on, and she looked back, lifted her gaze from the ocean of grass to the smoke-blackened brickwork, the ragged remnants of walls in the process of being swallowed up by grass and brambles Half the front had ripped away, so that, like a dolls’ house, a cross-section of the floors could be seen, a splintered staircase still leading up to a second storey.</p><p>Inside, she found the Yellow Sign.</p><p>There was graffiti everywhere, on every surface she could see, in paint or marker or scratched in slow-painstaking relief into the flaking plaster, and always overlapping: the old overwritten with the new, reworked, scratched out, defaced. Except for the Sign, which alone had been left undefaced. From the looks of it it had been there a long time, painted onto the brickwork above the fireplace, and refreshed and resprayed when it started to fade, layers of yellow paint, and around the edges faded yellow. Different messengers, she wondered, or did the same one keep coming back?</p><p>She’d seen it before, but only in glimpses, the phantom traces of the messages that appeared on walls like mushrooms springing up overnight. One summer her neighbourhood had reeked of fresh paint for weeks and she’d started to dream about being asphyxiated in her sleep. On her way to work she’d seen the men at work scrubbing the evidence of the King away, their faces shrouded so they couldn’t see. The work crews worked as fast as they could – at least at first: rumour had it the turnover amongst those workmen was unnaturally high – but the imprints of the Sign lingered, seeping through the fresh paint or shining like ghosts on the walls when the light hit right. If you knew where to look. After you’d seen it once, you started seeing it everywhere. Incorporated into graffiti tags, carved into a door lintel, traced with a finger in ash. Everywhere.</p><p>There were other signs of habitation. The lingering ammonia reek of piss. A camp-fire that hadn’t long gone cold, the burnt-charcoal acridity still stinging her nostrils. Blackened shapes sat in the ash, and she fought the urge to nudge at them with her sneaker, not wanting to turn them over out of curiosity and see the gaping eye sockets of a skull staring up at her. It almost certainly wasn’t anything of the kind, but it was like the Sign – once it got into your skull you couldn’t get rid of it, and you never knew these days. Better not to check. Better not to know, so then at least you could go on not knowing.</p><p>Something bad had happened here.</p><p>Memories of news footage spooled through her mind; wide-eyed reporters fighting panic, the sudden scramble and careening image as something unexpected collided with the camera, hellish images of violence and chaos so extreme her mind couldn’t quite make sense of them. And one from back before it got really bad: a reporter looking a little sickly, unnerved rather than afraid, while the besuited and otherwise entirely respectable man he was meant to be getting a sound-bite from gazed joyously at the camera with the air of one newly saved.</p><p><em>You are at war,</em> he’d said. <em>And the King in Yellow will win.</em></p><p> </p><p>iii</p><p>She’d hated Sebastian at first. They’d never been friends, but she vaguely knew a couple of people who knew him, which was how she came to be on the periphery of his group one night, wondering what the hell she was doing drinking with a bunch of people she didn’t even like while he held forth about the King in Yellow, being louche and funny and kind of a dick. Talking about how he was going to put on a version of the play, and was just looking for his Cassilda while he absent-mindedly stroked the hair of the girl reclining with her head in his lap.</p><p>In other words, he was a dick. But she was tired, and they were closer to the fence than she would have liked, and she had no way of getting home other than walking, and she was damned if she was going to do that on her own this late, and so she stayed and listened and tried not to roll her eyes.</p><p>“Who’d play the King?” someone wanted to know, and “Who do you think?” someone else shot back, pointing out that Seb was too vain to let anyone else take that part, while Sebastian grinned with feigned self-deprecation and a mock-bow. She watched him, desperately hating him a little more, while at the same time wishing just as desperately that she could know him better.</p><p>He gave a one-shouldered shrug, taking a drag on his cigarette and letting out a smooth stream of smoke. At a soft murmur from the girl in his lap he brought the cigarette to her lips. “If you think you can do better–”</p><p>“No way in hell I’m reading it. I’ve seen what it does.”</p><p>“That’s an urban legend,” the girl said, uncertainly. “Right?”</p><p>Seb’s eyes glittered. “Right. I’ve read it and I’m completely normal,” he said in a slow ironic drawl. That drew a laugh from the others, but his eyes were hard as he surveyed the group with a contemptuous glance. “Have none of you read it?”</p><p>A few sheepish head-shakes, and he was already nodding, his his assumptions confirmed.</p><p><em>Don’t,</em> she thought. And: <em>Keep your mouth shut, dumbass</em>, but it was too late because she was already lifting her head and clearing a throat that was scratchy from the smoke. Not quite sticking up her hand for permission to speak, but she might as well have donee. “I have,” she said. It felt like the first time she’d spoken all night – it wasn’t, but they all looked at her like they’d forgotten she was there. Except for Sebastian, who was staring at her as if he hadn’t ever noticed she was there at all.</p><p>The girl in his lap raised herself up on her elbows. “<em>You?</em>”</p><p>She nodded. “I mean... it was a while ago now, though.” Shit, she thought, why the hell was she trying to play it down? When as far as they were concerned it was the only thing that made her interesting? She added, with a wry tone, “Not like you can put it on anyway. It’s illegal.”</p><p>They all laughed at that. Even Seb smiled. She’d only kind of meant it as a joke though: there was always going to be a serious edge to it when she couldn’t help the way her gaze kept twitching to the darkness beyond the fence.</p><p>“Not what I’m planning,” Seb said, when the laughter died away. “It’s illegal to put on The King in Yellow, but what’s not illegal is performing a play <em>about</em> performing The King in Yellow. Last time I checked, they never outlawed that at all.” He jerked his head towards her, a jut of his chin. “Prove it.”</p><p>“Prove what?”</p><p>“That you’ve read it. Think of it as an audition.”</p><p>“I never said I wanted the part,” she said. What she wanted was to tell him to go fuck himself, him and all the rest of them, because for all their posturing none of them knew the first thing about the King or about Carcosa.</p><p>Instead she considered as she waited for him to reply, and when he didn’t, when the silence had stretched out so long they’d all started to fidget, she turned her head and stared out into the endless empty darkness and began to recite from memory, the words of Cassilda’s song rising to her lips before she even had to think of the lines. Unnerving really, how easily they came to mind when she hadn’t read them in years, hadn’t given them more than a moment’s thought, or not consciously at least.</p><p>It was the first time she’d ever spoken any part of the play aloud, and the words seemed to gather around her like folds of heavy cloth. It felt like something drawing closer, a bridge forming between the two worlds, between this world and distant Carcosa, until it stood so close she could taste the unfamiliar scent on the air, could sense it, waiting just the other side of an impassible barrier. Another world, hidden beneath the surface. Another woman just beneath her skin. And the terrible, glorious sensation of the King in Yellow turning his attention her way.</p><p><em>Along the shore the cloudwaves break,<br/></em><em>The twin suns sink beneath the lake,<br/></em><em>The shadows lengthen,<br/></em><em>In Carcosa</em>–</p><p>On the last word, a sound came from beyond the fence, startling them. Sebastian sat up, while one of the others scrambled to his feet, snatching up the flashlight.</p><p>The beam lanced through the darkness, catching on branches and leaves, jerking rapidly back and forth, first at head height and then lower, while everyone held themselves still, waiting for the shape to come sprinting out of the night and fling itself spitting and snarling against the chain-link fence. Nothing came.</p><p>In the chaos, Sebastian drew closer and caught hold of her arm, leaning in either to make sure she could hear him, or that no one else overheard. “You weren’t lying. You really did read it.”</p><p>She pulled her arm out of his grasp and glared coolly at him. “You thought I was lying?” From the look in his eyes she knew the answer.</p><p>The light had caught something, a fox, its eyes shining an eerie green. At their relieved laughter, it turned and swiftly vanished into the shadows.</p><p>After that, they all settled down quickly, breathless and keyed up on adrenaline. A few more cursory sweeps of the flashlight, but no one was really paying attention, so no one but her noticed the moment the flashlight beam skimmed over the pallid face of a figure standing motionless by a a tree.</p><p>She held a breath, let it out. Told herself that there was nothing and no one there, and mostly believed it.</p><p>Not that hard, really. She’d believed less likely lies.</p><p> </p><p>iv</p><p>A pile of copies of The King in Yellow, soaked in gasoline. The flaring of a match. And in the instant before that match was touched to the pile, a wind rises up, like it’s meant. It rifles the pages of one of the copies, rough-bound in fabric to make it look like it’s something else, something innocent. The pages settle on the frontispiece. And people look away, sure, but not all of them quickly enough, and not all of them decisively enough, and some in their number will have seen enough for the Yellow King to lodge in their minds like a fish hook.</p><p>Some things, once seen, can never be forgotten. And even in the constant battle to get rid of them they spread.</p><p>She’d never spoken to anyone about David until she told Sebastian, and she hadn’t planned on doing it until she started talking. One secret came spilling out, and with that came all the others, as though the first were the crack in the dam and after came the flood. She hadn’t realised how badly everything that had happened with her brother had hurt her, and how long it must all have been festering, until the moment Sebastian ripped away the scab and it all came bubbling up.</p><p>The nights spent both listening and trying not to listen to David in the next room, his low, insistent voice, filled with fear and a fervent devotion to the King that made it impossible to ignore even when his words could not be made out. He’d talk and talk and talk, the volume of his voice rising and falling, and his words punctuated by bouts of laughter and long silences. The silences were the worst, because in them it seemed she could hear another voice talking, sweetly cadenced but with an unpleasant underlying rasping quality which made her dig her fingers into her ears and burrow down beneath the covers as if it wasn’t already too late. It followed her down into her dreams, scratching in whispery breaths at the inside of her eardrums, whispering of Carcosa, of the Yellow King.</p><p>“I used to tell myself it was just David,” she told Sebastian. They were lying in his bed, his chest pressed against her back, his arm wrapped around her. “That he was just talking to himself. I told myself that so often I started to believe it.”</p><p>“Do you believe it now?”</p><p><em>Yes, of course</em>, she wanted to say, but hesitated. Outside the moon hung bloated and swollen, the colour of old yellowing bone. She could hear that voice again: it was scratching about in her thoughts, the way it used to when she was a kid, and even if it wasn’t real – and it wasn’t – she was still holding her breath, waiting for the moment it found her wanting. She felt like a dreamer who’d woken too early from a nightmare, and found it hadn’t stopped, unable to prevent the inexorable progress of the dream.</p><p>“No,” she said instead. “I don’t.”</p><p>“What do you believe?” he’d asked. His voice was soft, inviting her to tell him, to <em>share</em>. Like all he wanted to do was help, when she knew his real intention was to open her up and peel back the layers, because only by doing so could he learn everything she knew about Carcosa. All the secrets she didn’t know herself. All the things her brother had taught her and which, for the longest time, she’d been trying to forget. She didn’t want to know what would happen when she began to remember.</p><p> </p><p>v</p><p>On the upper story of the ruined house, she stood before a full length mirror propped against the wall. Sebastian had been there for a while too, but he’d gone now. A cobweb of cracks radiated out from one damaged corner. The foxed glass reflected her face back at her ten-fold through a haze of ash, and each reflection was slightly different. She was dressed as Cassilda, in a dress of crushed burgundy velvet, cheap acrylic sewn by a seamstress of dubious ability. The first time she’d tried it on, the fraying seam allowances had left her underwear speckled with what looked like flakes of dried blood. Now it seemed different, clinging to her breasts and hips, and subtly changing the colour of her skin and eyes. She didn’t look quite like herself. Just as Sebastian hadn’t look quite like himself either when he’d been there, how his battered brass crown had caught the late evening light subtly, so that for a moment it shone with the bright yellow of gold.</p><p>Themselves and not themselves, the King and his most beloved servant, both strangers with the wild light in their eyes that she associated with her brother, with everyone who had ever lost themselves to the service of the King. Those were the faces of people who had seen the skies above Carcosa, and heard the chiming music of the Hyades.</p><p>Below, the lower floor of the ruined house had been transformed into Carcosa. Or what Sebastian imagined it might be like, Carcosa by way of Edgar Allen Poe. Mirrors of every shape and side lined the walls, reflecting the candles burning on every surface. Music played softly, a discordant waltz with the rhythm slightly off and crackling with static, as foxed as the mirror. The room was empty, but it seemed like figures might be hiding in the shadows, eyes intent and glittering through the eyeholes of their masks. Yellow eyes, shining eyes. So that she’d be dreading the moment the time came to unmask.</p><p>No sign of Sebastian. She descended slowly, and moved towards the fireplace where Sebastian should have been waiting for her. She raised her gaze to the sign, her throat tightening with mingled fear and excitement, and surely she could sense them then, her audience crowding in behind her, standing so close she could feel their breath on the back of her neck. More of them, as thought they’d multiplied while her back was turned.</p><p>When they’d first come here, Sebastian had told her it was where he’d seen Carcosa for the first time.</p><p>He’d been lying.</p><p>She’d looked up the history of this place herself when he hadn’t been forthcoming about the details, so she knew roughly what had happened to him and his family. She also knew that wasn’t exactly the truth, and that whatever Sebastian was searching for, it didn’t matter if he searched until the ends of his days, he was never going to find it. It was like that for some people: they just couldn’t get it, no matter how hard they tried. The King didn’t speak to everyone. He was picky when it came to his servants. She could have told Sebastian that if he’d only been willing to listen.</p><p>The creak of a floorboard behind her. She already knew before she looked around who she would see.</p><p>David.</p><p>So changed she almost didn’t recognise him at first. Skeletally thin, and grinning at her, his clothes gone to rags. Her gaze dropped from the intensity of his eyes, travelled over the stains soaking what was left of his coat. Down his arm, to the brass crown that dangled from his crooked fingers. And from that, the hank of what looked like hair, soaked with something dark which dripped, forming a glistening black pool on the ground. His fingers were red and slick, and when she flicked her gaze back up to his face, she found his eyes filled with fire, holding her gaze.</p><p>“The pretender is dead,” he said, and threw the brass crown onto the ground between them. He was smiling. “Long live the King.”</p><p>When she backed towards the doorway, he let her go. Outside, she found Sebastian, crouching in the dirt, his body listed to one side as if his balance was off. He shivered at the sound of his name, even looked around, but there was an unfocused quality about his eyes, as though they saw into another world. Wild and bright with maddened joy, they searched the air blindly, focusing on nothing.</p><p>As she dropped to her knees beside him, he drew a ragged breath and smiled at her like someone who had had all their wishes granted against their expectations.</p><p>“Is he really coming?” he asked, his voice wondering.</p><p>Before she could answer – and she wasn’t sure, really, what answer she would have given – she heard the scuff of feet behind her. David’s wiry arms seized her from behind, dragging her to her feet. He pressed his cheek to hers.</p><p>“He's not important now,” he said, his cheek pressed to hers. She felt the brush of his chapped lips against her cheek, a brotherly kiss. “He’ll understand soon enough. The King is on his way.”</p><p>“I don’t want anything to do with this,” she said, wrenching against him. His arm snaked tighter around her chest, so tight she had to struggle to catch a breath. “David, <em>please</em>.”</p><p>“Hush,” he told her, and she could have wept at the gentleness of his voice and the reverence with which he breathed. “I said the same thing once, a long time ago. Don’t you remember?”</p><p>At her feet, Sebastian groaned.</p><p>“He’s almost here.”</p><p>She felt the air shift around her, the breeze rising up. It carried a strange scent, one she didn’t recognise, yet which seemed familiar in a way she couldn’t place. The stars seemed to flicker and blur above her, bleeding across the twilight sky. Her heart quickened its pace, battering against the inside of her ribs in a frantic rhythm. She shook her head, heard herself begging her brother to let her go, to leave her alone, she wouldn’t tell, and when he brushed her hair gently back from her sweat-dampened forehead, she flinched. He stood firm at her back, holding her still, ordering her, just as he’d done back when she was a kid, and in the same gently urging tones, to <em>look</em>.</p><p>Instead, as a vast deepening shadow moved across the stars, she twisted her face to one side. Squeezed her eyes shut, thinking, <em>No no no</em>.</p><p>She didn’t recognise the cry that came out of her mouth as human when her brother gripped her cheeks and forced her face back towards the sky. A wave of chill air washed against her cheeks, cooling the tracks where tears had forced their way from beneath her closed lids and burned their way down her skin. David panted, his breath reeking, his fingers with their too-sharp nails scrabbling at her cheeks. She squirmed against him, but could do nothing to stop him from forcing her eyes open, not without risking being blinded.</p><p>Above the stars whirled. And the King rose up. And he was as great and terrible as she had always known he would be, and she had never loved anything more than she loved him.</p><p>When she went still, when she stopped fighting, David loosened his grip and her vision cleared. She felt the layers of herself peeling away, one by one, being shed until there was almost nothing left, and all she could hear was a voice, raised in praise to the glory of the King, and for the first time she recognised it.</p><p>Not David’s voice, but her own, and she saw herself, crouched at the end of his bed, her hand laid tenderly against his cheek as she whispered in the night, weaving its tales of lost Carcosa, which could never truly be lost as long as she carried it inside her heart like a little yellow doll, like a seed rooted there and just beginning to sprouts. So well hidden she might never have known it was there.</p><p>She laughed through her tears of joy, through sobs that wrenched painfully at her chest, as the incandescent light of the Yellow King washed over her, so bright it burned. Even David had to turn his face away, pressing it into her shoulder, as if he was afraid to bear witness to this moment,</p><p>When her knees crumpled, he let her drop, but she kept her face upturned, her eyes so wide they hurt. She dug her fingers into the earth as if to anchor herself, and let the light baptise her, let it scorch away the woman she was, and all the women she’d been, let it strip her right down to her heart, right down to the little yellow doll that nestled there, and only then, still weeping, did she drop her head and turn away, cowering before the glory of the Yellow King.</p><p> </p><p>vi</p><p> </p><p>Her performance had concluded.</p><p>Above the sky was the colour of rust, painted in shadows of ochre and gold, and shading to dried blood where the twin suns had sunk down beneath the horizon. She was kneeling in the very centre of a great amphitheatre, dwarfed by the vast rising steps of crumbling weather-worn stone that rose up on all sides. The weight of the silence closed back in now that her voice had fallen silent. She was alone. Not a soul, not a sound, but for the desolate song of the wind howling in the remains of the ruined city.</p><p>No, not quite alone. The wind rose up, catching in the King’s banners and making them snap. It brought with it the odour of burning, the ash gritty on the air. She’d cough it up later, her saliva black and tainted. For now, she held herself still, waiting and trembling until he came, his progress slow and stately. Time had no meaning for him. She kept her head down, because to look at him unmasked was to gaze upon the surface of a sun. Something which few living people had done. As far as she knew, she was the last.</p><p>She’d been crying. She could feel the tears on her cheeks, but she’d forgotten why, had forgotten everything but the glory of the King, who cupped her cheek and bade her, without words, to rise.</p><p> </p>
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